WASHINGTON – Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) today joined Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and other senators in introducing the Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act to restore and protect competition in digital advertising. The legislation would eliminate conflicts of interest that have allowed leading Big Tech platforms to manipulate ad auctions and impose monopoly rents on large portions of the U.S. economy.
“Big Tech does not have the right to stack the deck in its favor at the expense of competition. I’m supporting the AMERICA Act to hold Big Tech accountable for anti-competitive behavior and limit its power to manipulate ads that get pushed to unsuspecting consumers,” said Kennedy.
“Companies like Google and Facebook have been able to exploit their unprecedented troves of detailed user data to obtain vice grip-like control over digital advertising, amassing power on every side of the market and using it to block competition and take advantage of their customers. . . . That is why I have introduced this bill, and why I believe it is the first step towards liberating the internet—and therefore much of the 21st century economy—from the grip of Big Tech monopolists,” said Lee.
Google and Facebook dominate digital advertising. Google is the leading or dominant player in every part of the ad tech economy: the ad-buying side, the ad-selling side and the exchange that connects them. 90 percent of large publishers use Google Ad Manager. In the third quarter of 2018, Google Ad Manager served 75 percent of all online display ad impressions.
Google uses its pervasive market power across the digital advertising ecosystem—and exploits numerous conflicts of interest—to extract monopoly rents and stack the deck in its favor. These monopoly rents function as a tax—upwards of 40 percent—on every ad-supported website and every business that advertises online. Collectively, that represents a huge segment of the modern economy.
The AMERICA Act would restore and protect competition in digital advertising in two ways. It would prohibit large digital advertising companies from owning more than one part of the digital ad ecosystem if the company processes more than $20 billion in digital ad transactions. The bill would also require medium-sized and larger digital advertising companies that process more than $5 billion in digital ad transactions to abide by several obligations to protect customers and competition.
